The most publicized modern architecture built along the lower Río Grande in the 1960s was produced in conjunction with a Mexican government initiative, the Programa Nacional Fronterizo (National Border Program), known by its acronym PRONAF. Conceived by a former mayor of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Antonio Jáquez Bermúdez, who had also been director general of Petroleos Mexicanos, PRONAF was intended to reduce Mexico’s balance of trade deficit with the U.S. by improving the image of Mexican border cities, attracting more U.S. tourists, providing modern retail trade centers so that residents of Mexican border cities would buy consumer products on the Mexican side of the border, and stimulating employment with what became the maquiladora system by attracting foreign manufacturers to open plants where Mexican workers could assemble goods for re-export.

Pani and Galguera designed a sequence of steel-framed, concrete-roofed retail shops between Colonial Jardín and Matamoros’s zona centro in 1964 for Mexican businesses selling Mexican products to Mexican consumers.

Text and photo by Stephen Fox

As one can see, the building has gone through extreme changes to its facade.

McAllen artist and art collector Ann Maddox Moore built this amazing modern house, designed by Merle A. Simpson, in 1959. Nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac that backs up to the Louisiana-Río Grande Canal Co.’s main canal, which ran parallel to S. 2nd Street, the one-story, post-beam-and-deck house is extraordinarily simple. A honeycombed solar […]

Architect Max Burkhart’s house attests to his involvement with concrete construction in the 1960s and 1970s. Burkhart founded Valcon, a Pharr construction company specializing in concrete tilt wall construction, with Farris O. Shannon in 1963. The one-story courtyard house is entered through a canopied porte-cochère-carport roofed with concrete umbrella vaults supported on extremely thin columns. […]

This is a design – build project conducted in partnership between Texas Southmost College Architecture Program and Brownsville Healthy Communities and bc Workshop. A two week design phase was completed by a group of ten (10) students from TSC Architecture Program as one of their Design Studio II service learning projects. A committee of professional […]

Thanks to preservation conscious developers like Jim Snyder of Elm Tree Partners, LLC the Lubbock, Texas Post Office & Federal Building will soon be a mixed-use residential complex. The building will house 24 apartments, and will preserve architectural features like windows, flooring, stairways and ceilings. This past month of May, I had the privilege of […]

Juan O’Gorman designed this modern building for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in 1937. I had the opportunity of visiting this past month of February 2016. The place is incredible! industrial and modern even today. Large windows are the center piece of the building and the second floor bridge connecting both buildings ideal even for […]

One of the two grandest houses built in Brownsville in the Depression decade was this country house, designed by Brownsville architects A. H. Woolridge and Frank E. Torres for Katherine Barnes and S. Miller Williams, Jr., of Tulsa OK. Williams and his brother founded a construction company that eventually specialized in steel pipeline construction. The […]

In his free time Brownsville Heritage Officer Roman McAllen, Assoc. AIA, a graduate of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, has rehabilitated a pair of dwellings for himself and his wife, Lisa, and also for his mother, Sybil Baytes McAllen, and brother Mark. The recycling of these houses demonstrates the […]